Sunday, February 26, 2012

How to Conduct a Confidential Job Search

In this job market it is a blessing to have a job but many
are not happy with their situation and want to make a change without putting
their current job at risk. In this
article I present several tips to conduct a confidential job search for busy
professionals.

Pick up the phone and get
in touch with a few of your close industry contacts and put out a few
feelers to see if there are any unadvertised opportunities. I say close contacts because you want to
limit the number of people who know about your search.

Change your Linkedin
settings to prevent broadcasting profile updates to your entire
network. Go to Linkedin.com and at
the top right of the page hover over your name and click settings. Then go down to the middle of the page
and click Profile. Under privacy
controls click "Turn on/off your activity broadcast" and uncheck
"Let people know when you change your profile". Next click "Select who can see your
activity feed" and change to "Only you".

Included an email or a
phone number in your profile. The
best way to handle this is to include your phone number or email address
under the Personal Information heading at the bottom of your LinkedIn
profile. To update this go to the
top of the page hover over Profile, click edit and then scroll down to
Personal Information and click Edit.

One additional tip, setup
a Gmail account and a Google phone number to use for your job
search. For the email I would
recommend using a combination of your first name and your title. Also, make sure you forward your new
email and phone number to an email account and phone that you regularly
check.

Now with the basics out of
the way one of the best ways to get noticed without spending too much time
is to update your profile with relevant key words by following the advice
in my "Think Before you Send" article.
The keywords should be listed in the summary section under
specialties. I recommend having
between 15 and 20 keywords/phrases.

Get connected with recruiters
on Linkedin; I recommend getting connected to recruiters in your
industry. The best way to do this
is to conduct an Advanced search and under keywords type “Recruiter” and “Your
Industry” and then select your country and if in the US your Postal Code. To get to the Advanced search page go to
the LinkedIn home page at the top right click Advanced and under keywords
type your search.

Setup job alerts on all
the major job boards including Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Indeed.com
and SimplyHired.com. Be sure to
include 2 to 3 of the most relevant keywords you found by using my Think
Before you Send article as this will greatly reduce the amount of junk
alerts you get.

Finally be smart about
interviews and try to schedule them before or after regular business hours
or during lunch. If that is not
feasible take a personal or vacation day.

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recruiterMikeC's Recommendations. I have personally read each book listed and all items are Amazon Best Sellers.

The photo used is a Creative
Commons photo created by Michael M Kenny with Atrribution-NonCommercial –
ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license; the photo can be found on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelmkenny/5399118081/in/pool-1552178@N21/

1 comment:

I'm not on linkedin, maybe I'm just old school in the sense that I can only keep up with one social networking sight. However, I enjoyed reading your information. In particular, I think you hit the nail on the head when you stated to share your job search with your most valuable and *close* contacts.

In the world we live in where so many people seem to be connected in one way or another, especially online through social networking sites, word gets around quickly. And, the confidentiality of your search can be jeopardized.